Commercial strategy for the wine trade
Great wine does not sell itself. It never did.
You have made the wine. You have the awards, the scores, maybe an agent and a stand at the trade fairs. But the enquiries are flat, the agent is quiet, and you cannot say exactly why.
The wineries winning in export markets are not always the ones making the best wine. They are the ones who know what is actually holding them back — and deal with that first.
No pitch. An honest look at what is happening and what to do first.
Built for wine businesses
The wine trade is not one business.
A winery, a retailer and a restaurant group all sell wine. They do not share the same problem. So the work starts where it is most specific.
Wineries & producers
Owners who have invested in quality and built some export presence, but are not seeing the commercial return they expected.
The work is positioning, market entry and making an estate or region land with buyers who have never been there.
Wine retailers & merchants
A good range and a real point of view, not yet showing up in enquiries, footfall or returning customers.
Restaurants, wine bars & hospitality
Wine knowledge in the building, but not yet turned into stronger lists, better margin and guests who come back.
Sound familiar?
You can feel the problem. You cannot name it.
Most wine businesses know something is not working before they can say what. The symptoms are easy to list. The cause is not.
"My agent isn't selling and I don't know if it's the wine, the price or the pitch."
Export presence exists, but the volume never follows. Nobody can say whether the problem is the partner, the positioning or the product.
"The cellar door is busy, but nobody comes back."
Visitors arrive, taste, enjoy it, leave — and the visit never turns into a list placement, a repeat order or a name on a mailing list.
"My story works at home. It falls flat with buyers who have never been to my region."
What is obvious to everyone locally — the place, the family, the way the wine is made — does not survive the trip to a market that has never heard of it.
"Our website says what we do. It doesn't give anyone a reason to get in touch."
The business is visible. The commercial reason to act is missing, so traffic arrives and leaves without an enquiry.
"We are busy, but the margin isn't there."
Bottles move, the team works hard, and the numbers at the end of the quarter never match the effort.
"We have tried things. None of them changed the result."
A campaign, a tasting, a consultant. Money spent on solutions before anyone confirmed what the actual problem was.
These are symptoms, not the diagnosis.
The next question is which one is the real one — and that cannot be assumed from the outside.
Trade intelligence
Wine businesses are data-rich and analytics-poor.
You already hold more useful commercial information than most industries: sales by SKU, margin by line, stock movement, customer behaviour, web traffic, list performance, enquiry patterns. Most of it goes unused — not because the business is badly run, but because nobody ever said what to do with it.
This is why the diagnosis is not an opinion. It starts from what your own business already shows: what sells and what sits, where enquiries stall, which markets repeat and which never reorder, what the traffic does once it arrives. The evidence is already in the building.
Data has limits, and they matter. It records what people left behind, not what they kept to themselves — why a buyer chose a competitor, why an enquiry went quiet, why a visitor did not return. Reading those silences takes trade knowledge, not just a dashboard. That is the difference between a number and what it means.
So the question "why trust this over anyone's opinion?" has a plain answer: because it begins with your evidence, read by someone who knows the trade.
How it works
Find the problem before you pay to fix it.
Start by finding the problem, not paying to fix the wrong one.
Most wine businesses spend on the fix before anyone has confirmed the fault. I work the other way round. It begins with a conversation, and only goes further if there is something worth going further on.
Stage one — "Let's talk."
A free 20-minute call. Not a sales call, not a discovery session — a direct conversation about what is happening in the business and what the real question is. No pitch, no obligation. At the end, if there is a clear next step, I will tell you. If there is not, I will tell you that too.
Stage two — "The Review."
When the call shows there is something worth examining properly, the next step is The Review: a deeper conversation, then a short written document setting out what I found, what it means, and what to address first and in what order. A fixed fee, agreed after the call. No retainer, no open-ended engagement.
You do not commit to the second step to take the first. Start with the call.
Why Wine To One
Wine expertise only matters when it changes the decision.
I have spent more than twenty years in the trade, seen from most sides of the table: fine wine retail and private client advisory at Berry Bros. & Rudd, retail operations at Oddbins, importing Spanish and Italian wines, buying, education, hospitality, events and judging. I built a wine division for a food distributor from concept to execution, and I have worked across brand management, export development, wine tourism and the launch of restaurants and wine bars.
That range is the point. Most wine business problems do not sit neatly in one box: positioning affects visibility, visibility affects enquiries, training affects sales, range decisions affect cash flow, hospitality affects brand perception, and data affects what gets fixed first. Seeing how those connect — not just how wine is made, tasted or explained, but how it is bought, sold, positioned, served and understood by the people making commercial decisions — is what lets me see the problem that sits across more than one box.
Being Italian and London-based has shaped how I work: an instinct to look outward across international markets rather than inward. When an Italian producer cannot get traction in the UK, or a buyer cannot read what a producer is offering, the value is not translation. It is understanding both sides of the producer–buyer conversation.
WSET Diploma (DipWSET) | WSET Certified Educator (L1–3) Sommelier Diploma | WSA Sommelier Diploma | International Wine Challenge & London Wine Competition Judge | Data analytics
Over 2,000 wines tasted a year.
Start with a conversation.
If something in your business is not working and you cannot yet say why, that is the place to start. One call, no pitch, no obligation — a direct look at what is happening and what to deal with first.